


It's an Experience

by pingnova



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bittersweet, Families of Choice, Food, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Episode: s13e03 Patience, Season/Series 13, Supernatural Summergen Fic Exchange, i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 01:52:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16108307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pingnova/pseuds/pingnova
Summary: Claire is working through some feelings about the death of a certain angel. When Jack tries to help, they both realize something new.





	It's an Experience

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kribban](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kribban/gifts).



> Written for kribban on the [SPN SummerGen 2018 exchange](https://spn-summergen.livejournal.com/292469.html). Hope it lives up to the prompt! I was inspired by a few they sent me but this is what I felt like I could reasonably do over the summer - I've saved the others for another time.
> 
> Jack and Claire interacting had been a passing thought before but after writing this I'm definitely more invested in them having some sort of relationship. I think it would be not just a riot but something that could be pretty deep.

Claire was calling it the Pity Party. A lot had happened to the Winchesters, recently and just in general. Jody, being their surrogate parent, was in full worried mom mode.

“I saw Dean recently on a hunt involving psychics and wraiths,” Jody explained. She steered them carefully onto the rocky road toward the bunker, lips pinched. “He didn’t look good. He looked thin and tired. I’ll bet he hasn’t been eating enough. Sam wasn’t with him but I can’t imagine he’s much better. Those boys have lost so much in such a short time.”

Claire could see the wrinkles stark on her face, like the Winchesters were aging her quickly. Really she knew it was just because they were more prominent when Jody frowned, but it seemed like every grief Sam and Dean felt she felt too.

Mary Winchester was gone, sucked through some portal. Claire had never really met her before, so she felt for them, she really did, her birth mom was gone too, but it wasn’t very real for her.

What was real was that a certain angel was gone too.

They pulled up to the bunker’s front door, set into the ground to hide it away from the road. Claire propped her chin on the window ledge in the passenger seat of the car while Jody got out and unloaded an arsenal of tupperware from the back seat.

It seemed like her cure-all was food. When Claire was sick, like after she’d been cured of being a werewolf and had to readjust to humanity again, one grueling cramping barfing day at a time, it had been soup for miles. Not bad soup, but lots of it. It didn’t really do much to help, except to remind her that Jody cared. So she choked it down partly to keep her satisfied, partly because after so long without someone who cared, she liked the warm blooming feeling she got whenever Jody brought her a bowl.

“Get out of the car, kiddo,” Jody called from the back. “I can’t carry this all by myself.”

Claire stepped out of the car and walked around to stack tupperware in her arms. “Alex could have helped, you know.”

“Well, she had school. She’s got a schedule. You don’t.”

Claire rolled her eyes, but only a little. Alex was in school to become a nurse, and had all sorts of weird hours at the hospital too. So while she also felt for Sam and Dean, she had a whole life going on away from the supernatural, and she wasn’t about to let that slide, even for a Pity Party.

Sam met them at the door. He gave them both loose hugs, careful of the tupperware, smile stiff, and led them into the war room.

“Here, I can—” he tried to take Jody’s tupperware but she bumped him away with her hip.

“You sit down,” she said. “Claire can take these. We’re going to talk.”

“We are?” His smile turned a little less stiff, a little more perturbed, a lot more fond.

“I am?” Claire said.

Both turned to look at her, Jody with a stern frown, Sam looking increasingly like he was going to insist on taking the food again, but Jody stacked her tupperware in Claire’s arms and shooed her towards the kitchen.

Claire heaved a dramatic sigh just to let Jody know how ridiculous she was being and turned toward the kitchen, only to knock right into someone. Some of the tupperware wobbled out of her arms. She watched it hit the ground, thankfully still sealed tight, and then turned an accusing look towards the person.

It was a shorter boy, probably around her age, with a flop of hair over his eyes and an apologetic look on his face.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Just let me…” He picked up the fallen tupperware.

“Who’s this?” Claire jerked her head, looking at Sam but getting a response from beside her.

The boy raised a hand in a stationary wave with a smile so toothy and blinding she squinted. It was completely at odds with the air of gloom hanging around the bunker. “Hi, I’m Jack.”

“Aren’t you just a ray of sunshine.”

“I probably could be, but that would damage everyone’s retinas.”

Claire faced Sam with a silent demand for information.

“Uh,” was Sam’s eloquent response. “Claire, Jack. Jack, Claire. He’s kind of in our care right now while we figure a few things out.”

She turned back to Jack. “What’re you, some hunter?”

There was no way she could have anticipated the response. “I’m a nephilim,” he said cheerily, like he hadn’t just admitted to being some kind of monster.

Claire raised an eyebrow. She’d read about them before, but there weren’t supposed to be many, if any at all. They were part angel and part human. Angels hated them, so did people. But they were powerful. And she’d imagined they’d be emotionless, serious, deadly. Like angels. But smiling Jack over here just apologized and helped her pick up Pity Party food. Being a hunter, she liked to think she’d honed her sixth sense, and she wasn’t getting a drop of dangerous vibes off him. Actually, it seemed like he might annoy her more than anything, if he kept grinning like the world was nonstop rainbows and unicorns.

“Angels are dicks,” she said, thinking of one dead angel in particular. “I hope you’re not a dick.”

“I don’t think I am.”

She whirled toward the kitchen. “Whatever.”

“Jack, why don’t you help Claire warm up the food,” she heard Sam say behind her, and then the nephilim was at her side.

Claire set her tupperware on the counter and got to work prying all the lids off the lukewarm food. It had all been frozen but the long haul from Sioux Falls to Lebanon, even with a cooler packed with ice, hadn’t kept them from the heat. Jack set his beside hers, watching her process silently. She glanced at him.

“Aren’t you supposed to help?”

“Right.” He prised off lids quickly. Claire got the sense he could probably rip the tupperware in half if he wanted to, because it looked like he was just peeling paper off something.

“You know what,” she said, setting the last lid on the counter. “You’re capable, you warm up the food.”

She took a seat at the kitchen table. It felt weird, being here but not saying hello to Dean or Castiel. Jody said that Dean was in an even worse state than Sam, so she wasn’t sure if it was better this way. Castiel was an entire mess by himself. On one hand, her stomach twisted at the thought that he was gone and her eyes got strangely dry. But on the other hand, she should think, good riddance to the person who stole the visage of her dad. The person who helped her find her mom, but drove her away in the first place. Who messed everything up, but had the gall to try to make things right.

It would have been easier if he hadn’t tried at all. Because she was going to miss him and his weird commentary about humanity, and the fact that she could call him with her issues and he’d listen, really listen to her, even if he hadn’t understood.

She realized there were no microwave sounds coming from the counter. A quick look revealed Jack was watching her and not the food.

“What?” she snapped. “You better not be reading my mind.”

“I can’t,” he said carefully. “But you seem tense.”

“Just thinking about someone,” she said shortly. “Why aren’t you warming up the food?”

Jack shrugged. “I’m not sure how.”

“Push the buttons. When it goes ding, the food is done.”

When he continued to gaze at the microwave, Claire heaved a sigh, hauled herself over to the counter, and poked the right buttons for him.

“Here, you just— haven’t you used a microwave before?”

“I haven’t,” he said. “I don’t eat much.”

She slid a tupperware of broccoli onto the rotating plate and hit START. The microwave began to hum merrily.

“Right, because you’re not human.”

“I am, partly,” he said with a consternated expression. “I have to eat. Not all the time, though.”

“The food doesn’t just taste like ‘molecules’ to you?”

Jack only squinted at her. She shrugged it off, thoughts suddenly far away.

“Something an angel I knew used to say.”

“Castiel?” Jack guessed. “You knew my father.”

Claire leaned an elbow on the counter and gave him her best raised eyebrow. “He’s your angel half?”

“He’s my chosen father. My biological father, he’s not really my family. My mother said Castiel would protect me, but… well…”

“I know. Our relationship was weird.” She hated how her voice sounded like grief and frustration boiled into thick mucus clogging up her throat. Castiel was dead. It wasn’t like he was her dad or anything. “Sorry, I guess.”

Jack just nodded. A pause settled across their shoulders like dust, the microwave still humming, and Claire moved on easy. Her voice cracked a little and it seemed like air was playing a game of tag with her lungs, always just out of reach, but it was easy.

“So you don’t eat much. Whatever you do eat must be good. What do you like?”

“I like nougat.” He brightened. “That’s it, really.”

Claire nodded. Nougat wasn’t half bad. “Have you had nachos?”

“I’ve never had nachos.”

“Well,” she scoffed. “Then you haven’t lived.”

Jack frowned again. “I’m alive right now.”

It was such a Castiel thing to say that she couldn’t help saying, “Wow, you really are related.” Jack just continued to squint at her and with his general air of cluelessness about absolutely everything, she made a decision. “They’ve been keeping you from what’s really good. I hear Sam and Dean just eat diner food and all Castiel has ever mentioned was PB&J. I guess it’s up to me to introduce you to the finer things in life.”

So she rummaged through the cupboards and emerged with corn chips and a jar of nacho cheese. They were still there from the last time she’d been at the bunker and scolded Sam and Dean for not having any convenient snack foods. Just some weird health cereal and beer. She popped the lid off the jar of nacho cheese, instructed him to pour it in a bowl and actually use the microwave himself, ripped open a bag of corn chips, and occupied the kitchen table with the elements before them.

Jack sat opposite her watching the cheese and chips like they were a particularly serious documentary he might be tested on later. She gestured.

“Well? Dig in.”

“How do you eat it?”

 _You dip the chips_ , she wanted to say. _Duh_. But a sort of morbid curiosity gripped her. “How do you think?”

“I think I need a spoon for the cheese,” he said. “It’s liquid. And the chips… I could break them into the cheese. They go together, right? Like cereal and milk.”

She stared. “Have you only ever eaten cereal?”

“I’ve had pizza too.” But he didn’t refute it.

“Jesus Christ,” she muttered.

He shrugged. “I don’t need to eat much. What I’ve had sustains me, I don’t understand why I would need anything more.”

“You don’t eat just to… sustain yourself. You eat because you’re bored, or high, or for fun. Or because your family is eating. Or because it tastes good.”

“You eat because… you want to,” Jack surmised. “You eat to socialize with family and friends. Eating isn’t just a bodily function, it’s an experience.”

“Sure.”

He blindsided her with such an earnest expression full of joy and heartache that she shuffled uncomfortably. It wasn’t like she’d just handed him undying companionship or something.

“You made me food, we’re eating together. We’re friends?”

“We were already kind of friends. You’re Sam and Dean and Castiel’s friend, right? That makes you my friend too, sort of.” But then she took a second to think about it and realized, no, he wasn’t really her friend. She’d just met him, didn’t know him well, but called Castiel his father and lived with Sam and Dean. Actually, he was kind of her family. Like that weird cousin she only just barely knew.

“I’m… happy?” he said like a question. But slowly he brightened and sat up from his slouch, smiling at her. “I’m happy,” he decided. “I don’t have many friends. I think Dean just started to like me, Castiel is gone, and Sam has been like my caretaker. But you’re a friend. You… You want to spend time with me because you like me. You choose to.”

“Well, Sam did shove you in here to work with me,” she grumbled. But when his smile dimmed, she added: “The nachos were all me though. Which you haven’t even tried yet, the cheese must be getting cold.”

She laid a finger on the bowl and true to her words, it was room temperature. Jack glanced at it and all at once the cheese bubbled and started to steam again. She snatched her finger away with a hiss, trying to rub the little stinging spot on the pad away. Jack looked stricken.

“I only wanted it to be warm again, did I hurt you?”

“Just try the damn nachos,” Claire said. She’d survive a scorched fingertip. “You worry about everything.”

Before she could stop him, Jack scooped a handful of cheese into his mouth and popped a chip in, chewing thoughtfully. She stared for a second as strings of cheese dripped off his hand and then a laugh bubbled out of her throat. He diverted his gaze to her, still chewing, cheeks puffed out like a squirrel, since he shoved so much cheese into his face, and one laugh became a whole string of them. For some reason, she couldn’t stop. It was like a dam had burst and she just laughed and wheezed and wrapped her arms around herself and hunched over so he couldn’t see the tears gathering in her eyes.

Jack swallowed. “Claire? Are you alright?”

“You did it wrong,” she wheezed. “You just dip a chip in the cheese.”

“Oh.” But he didn’t seem to mind his mistake or the cheese coagulating on his skin. “You’re crying.”

She choked. “I’m not.”

“I’ve upset you.”

Claire pulled up the sleeve of her jacket and wiped at her eyes, not at all surprised when the leather just smeared the tears around rather than soaking them up. What a mess. “It’s not your fault. You just reminded me of someone else who didn’t know how to do anything functionally human.”

“Castiel,” Jack said solemnly.

The name twisted her lungs and she had to suck in a breath to keep more tears at bay. A shadow passed over the light and a hand settled on her arm when Jack took a seat next to her, putting an arm around her shoulders.

“You said your relationship was weird.”

“It was,” she said lowly. And suddenly like the tears it spilled out. “He wasn’t my dad, he took my dad, but he… cared about me. He wasn’t there when I needed him but he tried. That shouldn’t be enough, it meant I was so alone, but he… he…”

“He meant something to you,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. Sam and Dean miss him too.”

“And Jody,” she added. The arm around her was stiff, like Jack didn’t quite know how to offer comfort but was trying anyway, and she smeared more unshed tears around her face. “Seems like everyone misses that stupid angel. Probably more than me.”

She shouldn’t be so upset about him. He’d ruined her life, and he meant more to the others than he did to her.

“But you still hurt.”

The kitchen was silent for a minute. Either Jack didn’t know what to say or he was contemplating it all deeply again. Claire just wasn’t about to open her mouth and let him in on any more of this. The shutters pulled down over that mess inside of her and locked with a final click.

Still more silence. Just when Claire began to feel more uncomfortable than she already was, Jack removed his arm and pulled the cheese and chips towards them.

“Do people eat when they’re hurt?”

She smiled a bit. He was trying. “You have no idea. Nachos? Ultimate comfort food.”

“Well I liked them,” Jack said. “They made me happy.”

“They make me happy too,” Claire admitted. “They’re my favorite snack.”

This time Jack got it right, dipping a chip in the cheese and crunching merrily. Claire took one for herself, not really tasting the salty cheesy mix with the ashen taste of grief still on her tongue, but the cheese was warm, oddly comforting. Jack grinned and scooped up more cheese with a chip, closing his eyes like he was savoring a fine wine.

Weird cousin.

“Dude, the cheese was like, five dollars. It can’t be that good.”

“It’s the experience,” he replied. “A good experience.”

Though she could still feel the bitter sting of leftover tears in her eyes, she smiled a little, until a voice called from the other room.

“Claire? Jack? Is the food ready yet?”

“Crap,” Claire said, goopy sentimental mood broken by a shot of panic that only came with forgetting to do a chore. “C’mon, enough nachos, we were supposed to warm up the food forever ago.”

Jack jumped out of his seat. “I can do it this time! You showed me how to use the microwave.”

“Yeah, I did,” she said, hanging back as Jack retrieved the tupperware from the counter and began to place them one by one in the microwave and set the time correctly. “You’ve got a lot to learn, but I think you’ll do just fine, if you learn it all fast as how to use a microwave.”

“You too,” Jack replied, his tone completely earnest and tinged with a little awe. “You already know so much.”

“We’ll both do fine,” she decided, and ruffled his hair, much to his consternation.

Weird _little_ cousin.

“As long as Jody doesn’t kill us over these vegetables.”

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you thought with a kudos and/or comment. Ciao!


End file.
